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It was cold on top of that fucking Chinese mountain. The ancient temple was dark and damp.
They had barricaded themselves inside to allow Kitty Pryde to project Wolverine into the past.
A little girl who had to translate the mind of an unmanageable asshole into a hippie and chaotic past… they couldn’t be more desperate. And indeed they were. They were desperate, decimated and alone.
Warpath, Blink and Bishop stood guard. They were mutants unknown to him, survivors like Piotr Rasputin and Bobby Drake, like Ororo and Xavier…
They were so few.
He looked at X: he sat on his super-technological, levitation-controlled chair. His eyes tightened and his vision wrinkled, two fingers on his temple. God knows what he was thinking about or who he was trying to get in touch with.
The Professor opened his eyes and looked at Magneto. He stood in silence staring at him with that ocean-blue gaze of his which seemed too beautiful to be authentic. He had an unfathomable expression on his face. He was not speaking to him. No one really spoke to him, unless strictly necessary. And he was fine like that. They had tried to kill each other so many times…
Lehnsherr laid his head against the rock behind him: sitting on the ground he tried to ignore the cold and the tension so strong that he could touch it, his eyes fixed in those of Charles.
The chair suspended in mid-air moved toward him.
“I am looking for survivors,” the Professor suddenly said with simplicity.
“And did you find any?” Erik asked in the same flat tone.
“No…I don’t think there is anyone left but us, Erik”.
The tone was bitter in pronouncing his name. It was the voice of a tired old man, who all his life had fought and tried to prove that tolerance, coexistence, and difference were all perfectly understandable and, consequently, manageable concepts. It was the voice of a man who had seen all his certainties collapse, all his battles defeated and all his ideals trampled. Charles was the shadow of himself. He now stood before the one man who for fifty years had warned him about mankind. The one he had hated with all his might, whose predictions had now become reality.
“You were right… I should have listened to you,” said the professor suddenly.
Erik continued to keep his gaze fixed on Charles. His ice-colored eyes were no longer as penetrating and captivating as they once were. His gaze was dull, disillusioned, sad.
What surrounded them had destroyed everything. There were no winners, no reasons.
“No…” Erik whispered. “I was not right. And neither were you, Mein Freund”.
Charles raised an eyebrow. A faint smile rippled his thin lips.
“We should have found a balance… “ he continued. “But, alas, balance is perhaps the only thing you and I have never found,” concluded the German in a sigh, smiling sadly.
“We have never even looked for it, Magnus. It wasn’t balance what we longed for”.
Lehnsherr wondered if that phrase could have a sentimental or even erotic double meaning, as he moved his gaze to Logan’s tense and vibrant body, his face wrapped in Kitty’s energy beam.
He closed his eyes and took a long sigh.
“What are you afraid of, Erik?”
“Us…”
Charles approached. His mouth opened.
“Explain yourself…” he pressed on.
Erik made a gesture of anger with his head. He returned to look at him and this time the ice in his eyes pierced Xavier as it had done in the past, a past so distant, so remote as though it belonged to another person, in another life.
“Don’t insult my intelligence, Charles…or yours,” Erik gasped. “1973… can you imagine the two of us meeting in 1973?!”
Charles shivered all the way down his spine. He felt a sudden weight on his chest, imagining himself in that year, the conditions in which he was, almost eleven years after Cuba, after a whole decade alone, without Raven, without Erik…
A knot in his throat prevented him from speaking. He was only able to emit a subtle moan. He looked away from those fierce eyes.
“Between the two of us, I should be the furious one,” he whispered finally.
Lehnsherr rolled his eyes.
“Of course…the young martyr on a wheelchair,” he growled with malice.
“And you are the little Jew tortured in the concentration camp. Let’s play ‘who has the greatest pain'. Shall we, Erik?!”
Charles reacted with anger. It had been decades since the kind professor from Westchester had disappeared. The X-Man in front of Magneto would not bend. He would not have yielded, not even a little.
Lehnsherr looked at him with resentment, clenching his jaw. In all those years they had never faced their past. After Cuba, after the incident that nailed Charles to that chair forever, after Erik’s abandonment, everything had fallen into pieces, lost forever. And then forgotten.
Charles stared at an unspecified spot on the floor.
“I have never forgotten. Did you, Erik?”
It was like falling into a frozen lake. Was he seriously asking him that question? Oh, for God’s sake…
He had been rotting under the Pentagon for how long?!
To forget... oh, please!
“I wasn’t referring to that…” Xavier was barely whispering.
“Every day, for almost twenty years, I thought, then hoped, and finally desperately prayed that you…that you would contact me. You had Cerebro. You could have done so. If only to insult me. You have forgotten and deleted. Perhaps you had your reasons, of course,” he said bitterly, pointing to the chair with his head. “But even if I wanted to, I couldn’t have done anything for you fifty meters underground.”
“I don’t think you would have done anything, even if you had had the chance,” said Charles harshly.
“Of course…you always know everything, don’t you Charles? You see.”
Erik’s tone was full of contempt. Xavier feared that he would also feel hatred for him.
A long silence followed. They both observed Logan’s body without really seeing it.
Charles looked back at Erik.
“Would you have come back?”
He asked it in one breath, and immediately repented.
Magneto peered at him for a while, then frowned curling his lips.
“I never wanted that accident to happen to you, Charles, you know that, don’t you?”
In all the fights they had had, from the past or in the most recent ones, there never had been any desire to hurt each other.
Erik was sincere. Charles knew this.
“I know…I have never doubted that,” he sighed. “You didn’t answer: would you have returned?” he repeated.
Erik lowered his gaze. He tried to think back to the past, to how he had felt. To those moments of despair and melancholy before hatred and resentment.
Before he was convinced that, after all, he had not been so important to Charles.
“Did you really believe that?!”
Charles interrupted Erik’s thoughts for the umpteenth time.
The German became more irritated than he had really wanted. He was tired, frustrated and scared like all of them. The reaction was too violent.
“Stay out of my head, Charles! For fuck’s sake!”
He said it out loud, his neck veins swollen and his fists clenched.
Storm and Bobby turned to look at them in a snap. They didn’t understand: Magneto was furious, sitting at the Professor’s feet, who in turn looked at him with a distraught look.
“Sorry” they heard him say. “You’ve always worn your helmet… I’m not used to it anymore,” confessed Xavier, a little embarrassed.
I missed your thoughts, Erik.
Lehnsherr was breathing fast. He tried to calm down and regained control.
“Yes, I thought so… I believed that it was all… all the result of the moment, of who we were when we met, that it was the consequence of not being alone. Perhaps I wanted to console myself in this way…” he declared sad.
“Yes,” Charles tilted his head with a slight melancholy smile. “I thought so, too. It was easier to live believing that, after all, it wasn’t such an important thing…”
They remained silent again, looking at each other.
“What do you think will happen?” Erik asked quietly.
Charles raised his eyebrows: he wasn’t following Magneto’s thread of thought. He had stayed out of his mind as requested.
“When we meet, in the past. If Logan will convince you to set me free. What do you think will happen?” Erik explained.
Charles rolled his eyes and sighed. He tried to think back to his 1973 self, to his malaise and his deep resentment. To drugs and alcohol. Suddenly he thought about the human wreck Logan would find. He felt shame and disgust for himself. There was no other way, he knew, but he feared the day Wolverine would return and look at him with different eyes.
“I will probably punch you. Or at least I will try to,” he finally declared.
Lehnsherr smiled.
“Mhm… interesting” he whispered pensively .
“How about you? What’s your idea?”
Erik’s smile became a grin. His usual asshole grin, captivating and provocative.
Charles felt a motion of pure nostalgia.
“I’ll probably try to get laid,” he said brazenly.
He said it with impetus, without any preamble or attempt to sugarcoat it. As he had always done, without restraint and without shame. Obscene, exactly as he had always been.
“Erik! Charles blushed… “For pity’s sake…”
“Come on Charles!” he exclaimed vehemently. “Imagine: ten years underground, alone, locked up in an alienating cell. Suddenly you: still young, certainly charming and, from what you have told me, pissed off like a hydrophobic bulldog. It’s difficult to think of a different reaction from me…”
A smile.
Hell….what if that had really been the case? What if this is the way it was going to be at this moment in the past?
He thought of Logan. So embarrassing…
“I don’t think it will happen. I was really furious,” Xavier tried to dispel.
“But I have always had my means of persuasion,” Erik replied, winking. “And then… you don’t know, but I spent most of that time meditating and training every day. There wasn’t much else I could do,” he concluded mockingly.
“And what does that mean? Do you want me to believe that I will find you irresistible?”
“I am absolutely certain of it, Schatz!”
He used that nickname spontaneously. Without thinking about it.
It sounded strange to both men.
Neither of them had heard or spoken that German word for decades.
A river of memories invaded the minds of the two men. They were intense and strong thoughts that left both Erik and Charles filled with emotion.
Time never seemed to pass. Then, all of a sudden, Logan shook his claws cutting through the air and striking Kitty. Erik snapped and blocked him with his power.
Shortly afterwards the Sentinels found them.
Erik looked at Charles.
Xavier would have wanted to stop him from getting out, keep him and Ororo safe, but he knew that everyone had to do their part and that there was no alternative.
Lehnsherr nodded slightly with his head and smiled bias.
I’ll be right back.
Erik…
And he went out.
It was all very quick. It was a whole army of robots.
The whole fleet in full. It was the final act of extermination.
Everyone did their best, desperately, without reservation.
He controlled the jet explosion.
Ten, a hundred, a thousand metal fragments.
Target down, target down, target down…
Storm was saved, Colossus could look after itself.
A stabbing pain in his left side.
Shit!
Ororo was hit. No…. No…
Bishop, Piotr…
Erik was clutching his side, had pulled out the fragment and was bleeding profusely.
He would have died watching the last of his species exterminated.
He cast as much metal as he could find against the entrance to the temple and leaned against it.
Charles…
Blink saw him, created a portal behind him, and he slipped into it.
Inside the temple he fell to the ground.
His legs had collapsed. He struggled to keep his eyes open, his head light, a continuous ringing in his ears.
He breathed.
When he opened his eyes he got lost in a blue ocean.
He would have died looking at it. They would have died together.
“All of those years wasted fighting each other, Charles… “to be able to have some of those precious years back…”
He reached out his hand, and Charles grabbed it firmly and held it tight.
He could do nothing, Xavier, except desperately shake that hand. His throat tightened in a grip of anguish and fear. Then the sound of molten metal, Bobby immolating himself as a last resort.
The Sentinel entered charging its beam and struck. Dying Erik saw Charles seized in that heat and cried desperately.
***
“¡Buenos días señor! ¡Dormiste bien ?”
No answer.
“¿Señor? ¿Todo esta bien?” asked the concierge again.
Erik woke up. He was suddenly enchanted by a feeling of warmth and anguish that he could not fathom.
“Yes… muy bien, gracias,” he replied as he settled the bill.
“Will we see you again soon in Mexico City, Mr. Lehnsherr?”
Erik widened his gray, smiling eyes.
“I hope not, dear,” he replied kindly. “At least not anytime soon,” he added, so as not to appear too offensive.
Eight hours later he walked down the lane of the X-Mansion .
The sun was setting. Children were yelling in the park. Some of them were making out hidden behind the trees.
Erik snickered. He threw his jacket over his shoulder holding it with two fingers. He enjoyed the last rays of warm sunshine as he walked slowly through the park.
Despite his third age and the snow-white hair under the Panama worn obliquely, that tall, broad-shouldered man with athletic body and mocking smile, did not go unnoticed.
He entered the villa. A few students stared at him with curiousity, others simply ignored him.
He headed towards the study at the end of the main corridor. He made to knock but was anticipated.
Come in, Magnus.
He smiled and opened the door.
“Welcome back.” Ocean blue.
“Hello. Ice gray.
Charles looked at him for a few moments and thought how Erik was always damn charming at any age and whatever he was wearing.
This Caribbean version in a light suit, dark shirt without tie and matching hat was particularly effective.
A smile with a thousand white teeth made Charles wish it was already time to retire to his rooms…
Lehnsherr approached the Professor.
He had seen Logan sitting on the couch next door and had deliberately ignored him.
Charles blushed a little, but he did not stop him.
Erik leaned over and kissed him, barely opening his lips, a hand gently resting on the Professor’s cheek. He would have liked to overwhelm him in a far less chaste kiss, but he thought that Charles allowing him to kiss him in front of a witness was already an event.
“Oh, damn!” exclaimed Wolverine. “There are so many rooms in this place!”
Erik and Charles smiled, their mouths still touching.
Magneto looked at Logan and raised an eyebrow, grinning with a snicker.
“I just love the sofa where you are sitting right now, Logan. Charles gives his best up there, you know?”
“Erik!” crouched Xavier in his croaking voice.
Logan closed his eyes, wishing he had not just heard that phrase. He instinctively lifted his hands off the couch and sprang to his feet.
“I don’t think I will ever enter this study again, Charles”.
And he left.
“You’re an imbecile,” Xavier punctuated astonished.
“I missed you, too, Schatz!”